What Drives AI Citations? FAQ isn't what drives ChatGPT citations

A study of 158,099 answers and 468,037 citations across two 90-day collections of commercial questions finds that, within a single website, pages whose titles and paragraphs match the questions people ask are cited more, while FAQ blocks, structured data, summary boxes and page speed appear effective only across websites. Replaying questions through the engines' APIs shows every page ChatGPT cites is one its own search retrieved, and which pages that search retrieves explains far more of the variation than page properties (32% against 2.8%). The model's own knowledge also shapes results: ChatGPT writes brands it knows into its searches, prefers websites it knows, and names brands without any supporting page, with controlled experiments showing brand names reorder its rankings of products with identical facts.